How did we become a nation of hiders in a world of global information?

People who don’t practice a creative art, unlike those who do, may not correctly understand how art expresses and excites feelings.

Current thinking in the field of cognition views our emotions as a non-rational form of cognition. Feelings are cognitive assessments of things we encounter or imagine before we comprehend them rationally. We act based on feelings in many situations in which hesitation could be fatal. The rational assessment that follows may be a justification of action in response to our feelings. We cannot rationally decide to fall in love or to be afraid or to feel compassionate. Such cognitive assessments are informed by everything we feel in the moment and how we each may feel about anything is uniquely informed by our dna and all past experience.

When engaged in an activity that compels constant and alert attention; as, when I’m driving in traffic at high speeds, my action is guided by intuition that includes rapid integration of rational principles, constant recalculations as vectors of inertia change, and also incorporating knowledge of current performance characteristics of my body, mind and vehicle, and not only about the state of observable moving and stationary objects around me, but also, probabilities regarding a myriad objects and possibilities that are not observable by eyes or ears and also physical pressure sensed in relation to gravity, and all in a context in which inattention has a potential for catastrophic consequences. And often there are others riding in my car.

Writing and composing music is far less demanding than accommodating the un-anticipatable qualities of personalities getting into and out of my car: some with social or anti-social agendi, some who are young and curious, some arrogant and presumptuous, some with deep unfilled emotional needs, some frightened in an unfamiliar environment, some intoxicated, stoned or otherwise medicated–they all bring their unique emotional state to the milieu, and then are gone.